Seven North Web

(Via ReadWriteWeb)

The ReadWriteStart Channel has up-to-the-minute advice for new and re-visioning small business-people. Here is their much-referenced advice on URLS and company names.

Relax (But Avoid Really Horrible Ones) URLs matter a lot less than it would seem when you are starting out. One can think of plenty of terrible names that did great and vice versa. We are now moving away from destination sites. Search engines and browser capabilities, such as Firefox’s awesome bar, will help people find you. If you are relying on a great name to build traffic… don’t. Unless you have a lot of money to buy an existing domain — and that is probably not a good use of your cash — there are cheaper ways to build traffic. So then, “okay” is good enough. Don’t obsess over the URL. Save your obsessing for usability design. But avoid the real stinkers, the names that make people laugh at you and then ignore you. We live in a global world, too, so do check that your great URL does not mean “Your mother is a mangy dog” in Chinese, French, or whatever.

Read the whole piece at ReadWriteWeb.

Add A Local Focus. If your business’ blog generates frequently-searched-for search-terms, that’s dandy, but your site is likely to appear many pages back in a search engine, buried under older, richer, craftier competitors This is called “invisible”, or “you-don’t-exist, amigo”. Not good.

One way to increase your visibilty is to add local appeal. Almost every small business draws, to a greater or lesser degree, from a pool of local clients. Why not include your city, county and nearby place-names in your tags, titles and text?

Here is an example: I was listening to one of many of my subscriptions to podcasts concerning social media marketing. I remembered one podcast concerning “Long Tail keywords“, which is a juxtaposition of marketing terms I had never heard before, and found it very interesting, interesting enough in fact to write this blog post.

But I couldn’t remember which podcast I had heard it on, and my iTunes account is on my home machine. What I did remember is that the podcaster’s home base, and likely their business, was somewhere around Tampa Bay, because they were localizing it through comments about great weather, sports, yada yada.

So I search on the Terms “Social Media Marketing Tampa”, and was able to find their distinctive url www.findandconvert.com, which I immediately remembered on sight, with little difficulty. Had I searched only on “Social Media Marketing”, or “Social Media Marketing Podcast” I would have given up in a few minutes of frustration.

So I am able to present to you the very useful and thought provoking podcast segment “Long Tail Keywords” for your enlightenment below. This comes to you courtesy of Find And Convert, a Tampa internet marketing company with an emphasis on SMM. I have found all of their podcasts useful and eminently listenable, and I highly recommend that you listen to them, or better yet subscribe and stick ‘em in your ears via your portable mp3 player.

FnC-longtail-sk.mp3